Coaching Up Your Sales Team

Sales Leadership and Coaching are Critical to Developing an Intelligent Sales Force

Sales leaders who grow and advance their careers have mastered three things:

1. Finding and keeping great talent
2. Coaching that talent to success
3. Exploring a system that measures and replicates success.

For those dynamic leaders who realize that steady progress can lead to exponentially improved outcomes, one specific fact crystallizes: coaching, perhaps more than anything, is one of the most transformative drivers of growth.

Unfortunately, too many sales teams out there don’t have a refined process. In fact, many sales managers — handed a winning process to follow — will naturally push back. For them, even if they see how the process of coaching up adds extraordinary value, they fear that embracing it means admitting to their boss that they didn’t have a working process before. It’s not an admission of guilt, and that fear may be what’s stopping your sales team from opening the floodgates and unlocking their full potential.

As a leader, your focus has to be on your team’s accountabilities and discipline, building on their strengths and identifying areas for growth, aligning your team’s skills with where the industry is headed, and more. What it boils down to is this: You are what you do, and every sales leader needs to do three things and do them consistently to coach up a successful selling team.

1. Work the leading indicators. It’s about seeking to identify those long-term opportunities and aligning your selling organization with the competencies needed to succeed in the future.
2. Work the deals. No matter how busy your day is or what’s on your plate, you must be willing to stop everything to help your sellers work and win a deal.
3. Work the development gaps. This is about understanding your team, their strengths, and eliminating blind spots. Allowing you to help them get better, faster, and smarter—quarter over quarter.

If you have successfully transformed a team of novice sellers into expert deal makers, astronomical growth that will dazzle the socks off of any board of directors will surely follow. And it’s not necessarily some far-future return, either. While programs focused on team-wide growth certainly have merit, one-on-one coaching is extremely powerful in that it can develop team members much more rapidly.

AuctusIQ offers an array of training modules for each coaching member. Need to develop selling competencies, refine a team’s forecasting ability or understand how to best leverage specific skill sets on the team? We’ve got you covered. If you're interested in exploring what AuctusIQ has to offer, send us a DM and we'll get you connected with an expert.

Hear more from Dr. Courtney McCashland on this podcast episode about the science of sales talent.

Dr. Courtney McCashland?is Co-Founder and Chief Officer of Science & Strategy at AuctusIQ. She has invested 25+ years working and learning in a variety of organizations, starting her own companies, and studying salespeople of every kind.